Monday, October 04, 2010
Watch out, April
The past weekend marked the definitive end of my summer vacation. After one final conference trip to Tacoma and a stop by Berkeley to witness the union of my friends the Skiing Chemist and Princess Noodle, it was back to Old Ivy. The weather has abandoned any pretense of pleasantness and cold, drizzly weather looms on the horizon for the next few days, a gray reminder that the time for fun is past and it's time to get back to work.
What will that entail? Well, the short answer is chapter writing. In our first meeting of the semester, my advisor suggested that I might be able to finish my dissertation by next summer, but only if I can crack down and get some writing done. I confess that I've been stalling somewhat since then, performing some new archival research in the Old Ivy Archives. But now, the clock is ticking, because I signed up to present a new chapter at my program's works-in-progress seminar in mid-December. That leaves me with basically 2 months to write a chapter, which is not impossible...but I really need to get working.
Today I made a list of all the materials I will need to go through prior to starting to write. There's a hell of a lot. Laboratory notebooks, research reports, journal articles, and on and on and on. My hope is to get through reading all of that by Halloween and finish writing the draft by Thanksgiving. I'd prefer to accomplish these tasks while maintaining some sense of balance in my life, i.e. without reverting into some sort of paranoid hermit who sleeps only four hours a day and lives off scraps found in the student lounge.
Whether or not this is overly ambitious or October will prove to be the cruelest month in a while work-wise, we'll have to see.
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The past weekend marked the definitive end of my summer vacation. After one final conference trip to Tacoma and a stop by Berkeley to witness the union of my friends the Skiing Chemist and Princess Noodle, it was back to Old Ivy. The weather has abandoned any pretense of pleasantness and cold, drizzly weather looms on the horizon for the next few days, a gray reminder that the time for fun is past and it's time to get back to work.
What will that entail? Well, the short answer is chapter writing. In our first meeting of the semester, my advisor suggested that I might be able to finish my dissertation by next summer, but only if I can crack down and get some writing done. I confess that I've been stalling somewhat since then, performing some new archival research in the Old Ivy Archives. But now, the clock is ticking, because I signed up to present a new chapter at my program's works-in-progress seminar in mid-December. That leaves me with basically 2 months to write a chapter, which is not impossible...but I really need to get working.
Today I made a list of all the materials I will need to go through prior to starting to write. There's a hell of a lot. Laboratory notebooks, research reports, journal articles, and on and on and on. My hope is to get through reading all of that by Halloween and finish writing the draft by Thanksgiving. I'd prefer to accomplish these tasks while maintaining some sense of balance in my life, i.e. without reverting into some sort of paranoid hermit who sleeps only four hours a day and lives off scraps found in the student lounge.
Whether or not this is overly ambitious or October will prove to be the cruelest month in a while work-wise, we'll have to see.
